A Boring Week

I really don't know what to talk about today. All in all it's been a pretty dull week. My female staff has been reluctantly going to work as usual, Badger's been his usual neat and tidy self. Always colour coding his vegetables before he eats them and always making a beautifully artistic pile of bush chocolate in the same corner of his cage. I like to spread mine about to give my cage that "lived in" feel. Mary the half tame magpie has been turning up on time everyday for her meat, as have Bubble and Barnabus the butcherbirds. Leroy and Lucy the lorikeets have been arriving as always at six AM for their seed.  So as you can see it's been a pretty average week. Oh yes. I nearly forgot..........My male staff almost died and has spent the last three nights in the intensive care ward at our local hospital. Apart from that it's all been very boring.

It started a couple of weeks ago while he and I were in England visiting his poorly mum.We'd done a fair bit of flying recently, what with two other trips to England and a couple to Africa. (You can read about these adventures in my earlier blog posts.) All in comedy class of course because my male staff is far too tight to pay for a business class seat. He started whinging and complaining about having a tight chest, feeling breathless and coughing up blood. That last little detail is never a good sign. Even his mad sister said that he should go to the doctor. He refused though, saying "They'd put me in hospital and then what would happen to Billy?" Touching eh? I always choose my staff for their loyalty.

So anyway, we get home and male staff tries to go for one of his regular runs. He gets about a hundred yards and has to stop and walk slowly home because he's puffing like a steam train and his chest feels as though Badger has been sitting on it all night. So the next day off we go to the human vet thingy. She pokes him and puts something icy cold on his chest seemingly just for a laugh. Then she tells him he has to go and have all sorts of tests and X-rays. See http://pemery.blogspot.com/2011/12/exploding-heart.html

None of these tests reveal anything other than the fact that Canadian radiologist have no sense of humour. So, back we go the next day to the human vet thingy who orders something called a QV scan, which my male staff assures me stands for Queer Vein but I'm not sure I believe him. So he and I get in the car and drive to Buderim - a town about forty-five minutes drive away. Here my male staff has this new scan which involves blowing into a metal box for ten minutes and then being shoved into a revolving metal tube for half an hour. It was terrible, there was no salad anywhere.

Once the scan was over we were told to sit in the waiting room where my male staff looked at semi naked skeletons in a 1997 copy of Vogue Australia while I chewed a copy of Woman's Day. Very nice it was too, especially the Thai salad recipe page. Five minutes later a doctor appears waving a piece of paper. He had a rather wild eyed, panicked look about him - rather like my female staff when she finds there's no wine left in the fridge. "You can't drive home like this!" He cried. "You could kill yourself, or someone else." That's interesting, I thought. He's obviously seen my male staff's driving before. He continued. "Your lungs are full of blood clots. If one of them shifts you could have a fatal heart attack or a stoke....or worse!" What could be worse than a fatal heart attack or stroke? I wondered. I didn't get chance to voice this question though, (Not that he'd have understood a small wheeking rodent.) because he said to my male staff,  "I've ordered you an ambulance and booked you a bed at Noosa Hospital. You're going to the intensive care unit immediately." Well, immediately wasn't exactly the right word because it took forty-five minutes for the ambulance to arrive.

So when the thing finally turned up my male staff was strapped to a stretcher while I sat on his tummy. Two paramedics watched him like a hawk as though he was about to croak any time at all, which would have meant lots of irritating paperwork for them and a late finish to their shift. Hospitals are fun. There are lots of cables and things to chew, but I'm not allowed to chew the ones that are stuck to my male staff's chest. These apparently tell the nursing staff whether or not he's still alive. Now they're pumping him full of anti-coagulant chemicals, so that if he nicks himself shaving he'll probably bleed to death. The boss human vet came to his bed and told him that he was very lucky. He said that twenty five percent of people with his sort of pulmonary embolism don't even make it to the hospital. Frankly I'm not surprised, the way they drive those ambulances.